


The One About the Lawyer

by dancinbutterfly



Series: Justified [3]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Law Enforcement, Alternate Universe - Lawyers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Faraday is totally an 80s kid, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Plans For The Future, References to Billy's in-fic history and all that implies, Teamwork, Trust, Trust Issues, keeping secrets, they're both such assholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 06:57:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10985751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: Faraday knew there was a lot of drudgery and headache involved in being a federal prosecutor when he applied for the job, but he absolutely did not sign up for this shit. Fucking Goodnight Robicheaux.





	The One About the Lawyer

**Author's Note:**

> Huge huge huge thanks to Elle and Hazel and as always Decoy_Ocelot. This chapter happened insanely fast and I couldn't have done it without you!

**Art Mullen:** You have the right to remain silent.  
**Boyd Crowder:** I'll assert that right and the one about the lawyer.  
**Art Mullen:** Fair enough.  
_\- Justified 3.13 "Slaughterhouse"_

* * *

 

Faraday stares over the toes of his boots at Goodnight’s face. He’s got his feet propped on his desk because it’s so much easier to use his office laptop on his actual lap that way and he’s got work to do.

“You need what?”

He plants his hands on the desk and leans over into his space. “You heard me, Faraday,” he growls and Faraday quirks an eyebrow. Aggressive Goodnight is not a Goodnight that Faraday is particularly familiar with and he's been working with the Marshal for so long that he thought he's experienced pretty much all flavors of Goodnight from the slick charmer to the calculated lawman, the deadly sharpshooter to the collapsing wreck stuck in anxiety attack, the trusted friend to the absolute fucking asshole who doesn't know when to quit (which is Faraday's favorite).

“Look, you know I’m not in private practice. I can give you a recommendation, though. Well.” He pauses and looks down at his screen and frowns. “No, I can’t.” He doesn’t spend a lot of time with other lawyers. They tend to be slimy, arrogant assholes. He should know, being a slimy, arrogant asshole himself. “But you can go downstairs and ask the bleeding hearts in the PD's office they know anyone.“

Goodnight pushes his feet off the desk and leans farther over into his face.

Faraday lifts an eyebrow. “That was rude.”

“Faraday, I need you to listen to me.”

Pinching his nose, he closes his eyes for a minute. He likes the Marshal Service. They’re like the modern warrant hunters of the old west which Faraday thinks is pretty cool. For that same reason, they’re also even more arrogant than lawyers.

“Alright. I’m listening.”

“What’s your hourly rate? I need to put you on retainer.”

Faraday rolls his eyes. “I am not- you know what. Fine. Fine. I’ll give you a consultation, like one of those sad office jockey bastards and everything. Thirty minutes. No. Fifteen. Make me an offer.”

Robicheaux looks at him for a long moment before fishing into his pocket and pulling out his wallet. He turns it upside-down and dumps the contents on the desk. Around fifty bucks and change clatter onto the wood along with a few cards.

“Oh, now, that is just sad.”

“And I’ll buy you a bottle of whatever you want.”

At that, Faraday closes his laptop and sits forward. The man has his has his attention now. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he warns.

Apparently, Goodnight’s has realized the door he’s opened too. They’ve gone drinking together a few times too many. “With a thousand dollar cap.”

Well fuck. Okay. He would have taken the fifty bucks. In all honesty, he’d have taken a dollar, done that whole bullshit symbolic gesture thing but he’d been trying to get a gauge on the situation based on what Goodnight was willing to give. Now, he knows that shit is fucking real here - five alarm fire, code ride, one-minute to midnight on the doomsday clock big because that kind of offer is way outside either of their paygrade. Goody will probably have to reach into his savings for that because it isn't day to day money.

Of course, he’s also not the kind of man who says looks a gift horse in the mouth and it’s not like he afford a bottle of Macallan himself. “All right Mr. Robicheaux,” he waves a hand at one of the two less-than-comfortable wooden chairs across the desk from him. “I am officially on clock. What can I do you for?”

“You can tell me how to keep the man I love from being arrested, convicted and executed for serial murder,” Goodnight says, sounding desperate. He looks up with haunted eyes. “He may or may not be the Assassin by the way.”

Faraday opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, closes it. He drops his head to the table so hard it hurts. He hopes it fucking bruises so that Goodnight has to look at what his idiocy has wrought. “Goddamnit, Goodnight,” he says into the wood.

“I know.”

“Jesus fucking God-fucking-damnit.”

“I know.”

He lifts his head and glares at Goodnight, who in this moment is his client, with whom he is now bound by confidentiality. About a series of killings. Committed by a known fugitive. Who took his victims over state lines on occasion. That the Marshal Service is supposed to be tracking. Of a case he is going to be pursuing as a federal prosecutor.

“Clearly, you do fucking not,” He drags his hand over his face before setting his laptop on the desk. He gets to his feet and crosses the room to one of his many filing cabinets. The second from the top, behind the Fs, is a half a liter of Johnny Walker Blue and a pair of glass tumblers. He tries not to drink at work, but desperate times.

He pulls it out and drinks directly from the bottle before spinning back around to point it at Goodnight. “Motherfucking Christ. Do you know what this could do to me?”

It's been awhile since he took any legal ethics classes but he'd bet the fifty bucks Goody's just gave him that the conflict of interest in this mess would likely lose him his job which sucks because he loves his job. Hell, maybe it could even get him disbarred. Nausea swamps him at the very thought.

“Well I don’t think it can get you arrested for aiding and abetting which is more than I can say,” Goodnight laments. “I have no idea what I’m doing, Faraday.”

“Obviously.”

“Well as someone who spends most of their life in such a state, I suppose I thought you might have some insight on how to handle it.”

“Fuck you,” Faraday says, with true feeling. “Seriously.”

“That’s not an argument.”

He takes another chug of his Johnny Blue. Yeah. Definitely not enough. One more doesn’t do it either but it’s all he can pull off before Goodnight is going to get pushy.

Fifty bucks, a bottle of insanely expensive alcohol and the fact that Joshua Faraday never went back on his word had him trapped until someone other than Goodnight put the Assassin in handcuffs. Goddamnit.

It’d be wrong to punch him in the face. Assaulting a federal officer is a felony and it’s so very much against the code of ethics to hit a client. He’ll do it later. After hours. At a bar. Yeah he’s going to save this.

“Okay,” Faraday says on an exhale, leaning back against the cabinet. The metal handles dig directly into his spine, his lumbar muscles and between his shoulder blades. “You wanted my counsel on saving the Assassin.”

“Hypothetically speaking, that's about the size of it.”

“I can probably negotiate it down from the death penalty if he turns himself in”

“And if he had something to offer?”

That makes him laugh, hard. He has tears in his eyes, actual tears. “Goody," he chokes out. “Oh my god, Goody, you must be fucking kidding me.”

“No.”

He wipes his eyes with his knuckles and looks up at where the marshal still sits in the client chair. His fists are clenched so tight resting on his thighs his fingers are turning white.

“The man’s killed suspected of more men than I’ve got pairs of shoes. You really expect the AUSA to just let that slide, because, what? He knows where some bodies are buried? He can hand over his client list?” He shakes his head and takes another swing. He’s going to leave early today. He’s going to call a cab and go home and watch Ice Road Truckers until he passes out on his couch, he decides even as he speaks. “I can tell you right now that’s not going to cut it. Maybe if they were Jane and Joe Suburbia but his targets were connected to people, people who are going to want him fried like a funnel cake.”

“Well fuck you for ruining that for me forever,” Goodnight snaps.

“You get what I’m saying though right? Your boy is doomed.”

“What about a multinational crime ring running under a company that’s traded on Wall Street?”

That is ridiculous. “That’s ridiculous.”

“High volume human, weapons, and drug trafficking for sure. He thinks that there’s also a possible exotic animal trade, possible organs too. There’s definitely other things but that’s what he’s seen.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m telling you, he’s reliable and if he tells me that Northern Pacific Multinational is running their own personal blackmarket, then that’s what they’re doing.” Goodnight’s eyes go dark and heartbroken. “They’re dealing in child sex slaves, Josh. Tell me that you can do something.”

When Faraday was a kid, his mom had worked three jobs so he was basically raised by the tv. Back then, David Copperfield was hot shit. He was also a smirking smiling creep. Faraday had wanted to be him when he grew up. His mom was just glad that all he wanted was a cheap how-to magic book and a deck of card for Christmas and that hours and hours of practicing kept him (mostly) out of trouble.

He’d liked every part of magic. The showmanship, the rhythm, the artistry, the speed and technique required to pull it off, the sneaky nature of misdirection. The most best part for him, growing up dragged around the South, his mom bouncing around shitty jobs and shittier boyfriends, was the way those everything made sense in a magic trick, any trick, once you put all the moving parts together. The law was the same way. He hadn’t realized it until his mom got stabbed in by shitty boyfriend number who-fucking-knew when he was 15 and he met the prosecutor for the asshole’s assault with a deadly weapon trial.

Ms. Younger been a heavy-set, dark-skinned black woman with dreadlocks she kept piled on top of her head in her mid-thirties with big eyes and a big smile she saved for special occasions. She wore pants suits every time he saw her and had talked to him like he was an adult, not some dumb kid who didn’t know how fucked up what he’d seen was or kept him out of the loop. He’d had such a huge crush on her, he basically humiliated himself with word vomit every time he saw her.

She worked with the CASA to get him excused from school for the duration of the trial. He was a witness for the prosecution anyway. Besides, school was boring by comparison. This was the good shit, watching that asshole get his, watching Ms. Younger weave a scene and lace together the separate pieces of evidence to create something powerful enough to affect people’s perceptions.

When the guilty verdict came in, he’d told Ms. Younger he wanted to be a lawyer. She’d squeezed his shoulder and told him “Then get your ass back to school, start saving and when you need a letter of recommendation, you call me.” Then she’d handed him her card.

He still had her card. He’d spent hours making it appear and disappear from sight in the years before he got accepted to law school. After that, putting together moving parts was about showing a reality, not an illusion, and he’d tucked it away behind his undergrad diploma.

Faraday still saw evidence for cases as moving parts of a magic trick. For this, he didn’t have enough facts to perform but he had the experience and training to put together what he did have into something recognizable. The general idea was repulsive and fucking tragic.

Diplomacy is not his favorite means of expression outside a courtroom, especially when talking to people he feels comfortable with. This time, though, he makes an exception. “Northern Pacific had him, didn’t they?”

Goodnight nods. His eyes are all puppy dogs and shimmering brightness.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Yeah, if some assholes had raped him for cash for who knows how long, when he should have been watching, whatever, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Rocko’s Modern Life instead? He’d be have probably gone on a scorched earth killing spree too.

Damn it. This was fucking bullshit. Call him a shitty person, but he didn't believe that every human life was sacred. Some motherfuckers needed to be put down and if that was what Goodnight's boy did to the guys who had done the kind of things Faraday was imagining, then he'd done the world a favor.

Of course, that didn't mean what the Assassin had committed federal crimes. Kidnapping and capital murder was still kidnapping and capital murder. He just didn't want to put someone with that history and motive in prison.

Jesus, he hated his job sometimes.

He takes one last swing of the blue label and rubs his right eyebrow with the lip of the bottle. “If it’s that big, and I can get the AG to sign off on it, we can maybe get him immunity.” Goodnight starts to speak but he cuts him off. “Maybe. Hard, hard maybe. And I’d want to talk to him first, hear what he’s got on them.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Then I can’t help him. Goody, I’m a fucking lawyer. I can’t break confidentiality here and even if I could…” He trails off and sighs. This is fucking miserable, the definition of a rock and a hard place, but he’s got some morals, damnit. He does. “I wouldn’t. Not if what you’re saying about their cargo has even the slightest chance of being true. I won’t. Someone’s going to have to actually arrest him first and if I did get assigned his case, I’d recuse myself. All right? I can’t even propose a deal if we don’t talk.”

Goodnight purses his lips and rises. “I’ll talk to him.”

“You do that. Now get out of my office. You’ve caused me enough grief for one day.”

Goodnight nods and makes his way to the door, stopping beside Faraday so that they can meet each other’s gaze. His stare feels too deep, too knowing. It sends shivers down Faraday’s arms and makes his hair stand up.

“You’re a good man, Faraday. You know that?”

He drops his eyes to his terrible green-grey carpet. “Get out of here.”

Goodnight bumps his elbow against Faraday’s and sidles out. The door swishes closed behind him and clicks shut.

For a long time, Faraday stands still, bottle dangling from his hand, eyes locked on the ground. He takes the whiskey with him back to his desk.

He cracks open his computer once he gets settled again, moving it back onto his lap and goes to Northern Pacific Multinational’s homepage. Research is his least favorite part but it’s important. He needs to know how things work before he can take them apart and make them his own.

The payoff’s worth it because he knows the secret of magic and it’s the same as in law and in life. It’s never about the cards. It’s about the person holding them.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:
> 
>   * Faraday couldn't not be a lawyer you guys. Look at my hands, nothing up my sleeves, give 'em the old razzle dazzle. It's so very him I couldn't resist. He's so good at his trade and so terrible at everything else that he seemed perfect for the job.
>   * AUSAs are Assistant US Attorneys. There are a bunch of AUSAs in the different federal districts but their head boss of all the bosses answer to the AG - Attorney General - and are responsible for prosecuting federal matters. Needless to say they work with the Marshal Service on occasion.PD is the public defender and CASA are court appointed special advocates they deal with people involved in various cases who might need additional help. They're good people and do good work but as is the case with most work of this kind, underfunded and understaffed
>   * I consulted two different lawyers for this chapter - one before, one after. So anything yall spot that is incorrect it is my bad and I apologize it but I am not chaning anything now.
>   * Ms. Younger is named after Andrea Young, J.D., who is the current executive director of the ACLU of Georgia. She doesn't look like the woman in this story but she is an impressive, kick ass black woman lawyer and this is my little way of honoring her.
>   * Macallan Whiskey is ridiculous. It can get into the 10s of thousands of dollars. None of the explanations I've read make that shit seem worth it at all, but what can you do? Rich people are going to blow money on shit that doesn't matter. It's what they do.
>   * I assume everyone's had funnel cake but JUST IN CASE YOU HAVENT it is donut or beignet dough(if you're in the UK, think the outside of a fried Mars bar but with no Mars bar and prettier) poured through a literal funnel directly into boiling fry oil in a swirly shape.   
>  It is then put on a paper plate, dusted with powdered sugar (which you can then ad other toppings to) and eaten with your hands. 
> 
> Tis a typical fare of fairs and street festivals and sporting events. There are all kinds of stands that they come in but nothing is as iconic as these. Magic. If you haven't had it, aren't allergic to gluten, and you get the chance, try one. They're repulsive and delicious. It's hilarious and wonderful and one of the most American things ever to exist. Make sure and something to drink with it. I recommend milk(if you can find it and tolerate it) or water or coffee or tea. Having a soda with it is for me, intolerable (too much sugar is too much). 
> 
> 



End file.
